It’s almost certainly ‘Laurel’, not ‘Yanny’, according to science

The audio equivalent of ‘the dress‘, a photo from 2015 that was perceived by some as showing a blue dress and by others a gold one, is now doing the rounds on the web, and it seems to be dividing the internet right down the middle.

In case you’ve been offline for the past several hours or need a refresher, here it is again. Do you hear ‘Laurel’ or ‘Yanny?’

However, a closer look at the waveform for the confounding audio clip revealed to Brad Story, a professor of speech, language, and hearing sciences at the University of Arizona, that it’s almost certainly ‘Laurel’, “because it clearly contains the primary acoustic features for an “l” and an “r”.

Well, I guess that means John Mayer isn’t just talking out of his hat: a condition called Presbycusis, which is basically age-related hearing loss, most notably affects your ability to hear higher frequencies – so it’s possible that more older folks might hear ‘Laurel’ than young people.